Kids' Obama obsession fades

At Barack Obama Elementary School in Upper Marlboro, Md., a giant mural of Obama and a glass case in the main entry filled with Obama books and photos greet students as they enter and exit.

But Tanya Moreland’s daughter Brea, in fifth grade, goes in and out every day and rarely brings up the president.

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“To be honest, all the ‘hoorah’ is gone,” Moreland said while waiting outside the school in her car to pick up Brea on a recent Tuesday afternoon.

Obama has seen his approval ratings dip among virtually every demographic and ideological group of voters — and now he seems in danger of losing their kids, too.

The president’s galvanizing appeal to young people in 2008 has become the stuff of political legend, and while the polls stopped recording data at the voting age of 18, the trend by all accounts didn’t. Obama, at the height of his cultural ubiquity in his magical election run, exerted a particular charm on children. His big smile, big ears and bouncy personality made toddlers his unofficial base. In Iowa in 2007, children carved Obama pumpkins, phone-banked for Obama and pitched the candidate to their parents. The Kids for Obama blog on the campaign website linked a page describing “10 ways kids for Obama can get involved,” including holding an Obama sleepover party.

The enthusiasm spilled into rival camps. Hillary Clinton’s aides recall an elementary school-aged child of one senior staffer chanting Obama’s name to her on a visit to headquarters. The son of Greg Pollowitz, a writer for the conservative National Review, then six, accompanied his father to vote in November and made a scene, haranguing him to “vote for Obama.”

Back then, conservatives fulminated that Obama was “brainwashing” the youth. Liberals speculated warmly on what it would be like to grow up under the first black president. But in interviews with kids and their parents around the country this fall, hopes have been disappointed, and concerns about brainwashing can probably be put to rest. The kids, as kids do, have moved on.

Back in 2008, 7-year-old Aron Mondschein from Ellington, Conn., wrote a letter to Obama as part of his class’s Flat Stanley project. When he got a response — complete with a picture of Flat Stanley in Obama’s Senate office — he got really excited about the election.

“I think that it was the excitement that he was running for president, that he is African-American … that was a really big deal for my son; he felt that was important,” said Aron’s mom, Amy Mondschein. Aron, like most of his peers, has since tuned out.

“If Obama were to set a new law that every boy 10 years old could have Legos, you know, for free, you’d be hearing about it. But right now, he’s kind of into his own things,” his mother said.

Catherine Quigley of Haverhill, N.H., “loved” Obama way back in middle school, despite her father’s skepticism. Now, she’s a seasoned and cynical 16-year-old.

“I didn’t really expect that he would do all the things he promised, although, at the time, it was fun to go along with the hype — the dreams of a new world and all that,” she said in an email to POLITICO. “I still think Obama was good for America, as far as presidents go, even if he was relatively inactive.”

Her older brother, Peter, now a junior at St. Lawrence University in New York, volunteered for Obama while in high school and still cherishes the fact that “I knew about him — it sounds weird and hipstery — but I knew about him before” he was a national figure. He said he hasn’t gotten involved since but that he’ll vote for Obama next November.

“I’m looking back and thinking maybe I didn’t have as much basis as I should have” for the passionate support, he said.

The passing of the kids’ enthusiasm is, to some parents, a reflection of the mercurial attention span that’s part of childhood in the 21st century. For others, it is a relief. National Review’s Pollowitz, who endured the poll-site scene, attributed his son’s views to “peer pressure” at a liberal elementary school. His son is now “more likely to be able to identify a physicist from a Science Channel show than any politician.”

Some children, of course, still have the bug — something that, perhaps unsurprisingly, correlates to parental passion.